


My Love, Unconditional

by RHBerry



Category: Original Work
Genre: Adopted Children, Blood and Violence, Family Feels, Gen, Murder, POV First Person, Short One Shot, racism mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:36:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27163957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RHBerry/pseuds/RHBerry
Summary: "I want to be a serial killer, Mama."
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	My Love, Unconditional

“ I want to be a serial killer, Mama.”

She told me I could be anything, do anything, and she'd love me all the same. She told me that the first day she took me into her arms, smoothed my hair, and drove me straight from South Bay's Foster Home for Girls to the mall to buy me new clothes and a chocolate shake. I used to throw things at her, scream right in her face, because no one wanted a daughter that wasn't easy. See, I didn't believe her at first, and why should I? Nice, single white lady comes barging down the door of a home and tells Matron she fell in love with me on the spot? I wasn't doing anything special. I hadn't inspired anyone to love me, even like me, before. But Mama wanted me, and after a while, I wanted her too.

She'd always been alone, before me. She liked it that way. But she loves her life better with me in it, she tells me, real insistent and earnest so I can't help but think she's telling the truth. When we met, she was pretty young. Twenty-two and just out of college. She had a good job working at a law firm, battling traffic tickets – I asked if she wanted to be a lawyer, and she used to, but her priorities changed. She wanted someone to love, honestly and unconditionally.

But I still test her, when I gotta. This is one of those moments. It's been eight years, and I'm nearly grown. I turn eighteen in six months. Mama tells me I'm her baby, that I’m her whole world. Once I'm old enough to hit the pavement without falling flat on my face though, I just can't trust that she'll be there to pick me up anyway.

So I look at her dead in the eye, take a big bite of lasagna, and chew. She's looking at me with big eyes, but she doesn't seem surprised otherwise. Doesn't even blink. She holds up a finger, takes a sip of ginger ale while she thinks that over. Rightly, I don't know what response I'm expecting, but experience has taught me she won't be mad. I smashed her own mother's snow globe, a real pretty antique, right in front of her once, and she wasn't even mad, then. Just helped me clean it up and asked what I needed to calm down.

Maybe this'll be like that time. She'll ask me why, remind me it's wrong to hurt anybody, and that'll be the end of it. She'll take it seriously, because I never say what I don't mean, even when I'm scared.

Mama swallows her drink. “Who are you thinking of killing first?”

The tines of my fork scrape across the plate. I run them along idly, drawing in the clumpy crimson sauce. “Subway teller, down at the station.”

“ I see.”

I hate that teller. He once called me a slur I won't repeat when he thought I couldn't hear him. I was having a bad day, lost my metro pass on my way to the bus and missed it 'cause he was giving me a hard time, and then he turned to the teller on the other side to make fun of me for crying. I wanted to kill him then, and I wanna kill him now.

Mama probably remembers how upset I was. She doesn't ask me why I picked him, in particular. She sets down her knife and fork; looks at me with a real serious expression on her face.

“ You don't have enough of a connection to him for the authorities to leap to you, first. Very clever choice, love.”

My stomach flips over. I wonder if she thinks she's calling my bluff, or if she's joking around. She can be a funny one sometimes, if you like puns. I do like puns, but I pretend like I don't.

This ain't a pun.

I watch Mama take her fork again and spear a big chunk of tomato. She says, “Have you thought about how you'll do it?”

Thought about it? Sure, I guess I have. I'm cautious, but I answer, “Sometimes. Sort of.”

“ Is it more like a plan that you have in mind, or just a fantasy?” Mama pops the fork in her mouth, looking so expectant.

“ No – I mean, neither.” I don't want her to put me in therapy, or suggest it again. She thought I might want to go when she first took me in, but I hate the idea of someone trying to get in my head.

“ Then we can talk about it after dinner. We'll form a plan together,” Mama offers. “I want you to make me a promise that you won't do anything reckless, but assuming you can wait... I'll help you.”

Acid creeps up my throat, and the tears threaten to come. If she ain't serious, this is a mean way of going about psyching me out. For a good thirty seconds, I wrestle with myself, ‘cause I don’t know what to say.

“ You serious?”

“ Deadly.” She cracks a smile. There it is, there's her little joke. I might need to fight a grin on a good day, but I'm trying not to jump out of my skin. Mama’s really thinking it over. It don't feel real yet, but it has the potential to – I see the man's weathered sneer in my mind's eye, and I loathe him so much it makes my toes curl. He's got to be in his fifties; at most, he's got thirty or forty years left in him, and I can take them all away. I can kill him.

If I do it right, and Mama really wants to help me do it, I'll finally be doing something just because I want to. My first taste of real control.

Everything up 'til now, it's been me trying to push someone away because I'm afraid, or bending over backwards to please them. I was old enough to remember my birth mother dumping me in the park, and there ain't a night that goes by that I don't think about it before I fall asleep. I was five, and she'd just had one of the most horrible fights I've ever seen with her boyfriend. Not my father, I never knew him.

I think she dropped me at the farthest park she could find, just so I wouldn't know how to get home, and took off running. Left her old life, left me. This is why I probably do need therapy, but I don't need a professional to tell me that I have abandonment issues. I know that, alright.

Mama looks calm. She reaches across the table for my hand, and I almost jerk it away because my blood is buzzing; I feel like I'm going to throw up. I'm nervous but so grateful; so scared to be grateful when the rug might be pulled out from under me.

“ Hey. Remember that I love you,” she tells me. “There's nothing you can do, and nothing you could be, that would make me forget that.”

She doesn't say that she wouldn't stop loving me, because the idea is absurd to her. Mama always said that people only forget why they love each other, not that they stop.

“ ... Can I be excused?”

“ Certainly.” Mama gives my hand a little squeeze, then retracts it. She picks up her glass of ginger ale and downs the rest. My chair squeaks against the kitchen floor, my footsteps thunder on my way up the stairs.

I go to my bedroom, fall face-first into my pillow, and I cry for the next hour.

  
  


Mama doesn't mention it again for a week. We're in the car, driving to the grocery store to pick up the makings of homemade pizza. We're singing along to classic rock on the radio when the song ends, and she turns the volume down without taking her eyes off the road.

“ Did you still want the kill that man?”

I'm quiet. I know she ain't asking for no reason.

“ Yeah. I think I really do.”

“ I need you to be positive, love,” she cautions. “I've given it a lot of thought, and I'm sure you have too. I don't want you to do anything you can't come back from without being one hundred percent invested in seeing it through.”

“ I want to kill him,” I say, “but I'm scared.”

“ Scared of which part?” she coaxes, “Just scared of getting caught, or are you scared of other things? How it will affect you, or getting hurt in the process?”

“ Just getting caught,” I defend myself, because I know I can do this right if I have the chance. He shouldn't even know what hit him if I kill him quick, let alone me. As for letting it change me, I don't see why it should. He's just one bad man that the world could do without.

“ Then I have something in mind,” Mama hums. “Do you trust me?”

“ Yeah. I love you, Mama.”

“ I love you too. That's why I've figured out how we're going to do this.”

I gape. “You mean it?”

“ I just need you to tell me when. Give me one day's notice. And, love...” she pauses, bites her lip; waits until we're at a stoplight to look me straight in the face. “I need you to never ask me what I did with the body. They can't question you and get an answer if you don't know, alright? If all goes to plan, they'll never find him, but I want you to promise.”

I look at Mama, really look at her. It's hard to tell in the sunlight streaming in through the dirty car window, but she's a little paler. She's already got skin like milk, could just be imagination. If it weren't for that, she looks so together, like she could do anything in the world.

Babies are supposed to think that of their mothers, ain't that right? That they can do anything.

I don't cry this time. I got it all out that day one week ago, got out my shivers and nausea and doubts. I want to be a serial killer. I wanna take out the people in this world who shouldn't be in it.

“ I promise, Mama.”

“ Good.” She smiles at me, gentle. She takes her foot off the gas and we go to the supermarket.

  
  


When I say I'm ready, it's a month later. I know what I thought, but I decided that it couldn't hurt to prepare a little extra. I learn to throw a punch, do weights every night, and by the end I'm not much stronger, but I feel tough down in my bones. I tell Mama in the morning around a mouth full of toothpaste. She understands. She always understands.

Mama calls in sick to work and says we can do it tonight, if I want. I say yes. She goes shopping all day, and takes the subway instead of her car.

She's been watching, getting us ready. I've got chloroform and a knife I can fold up and keep in my boot. She knows when he gets off work, near midnight. We time it so that she's leaving the subway station fifteen minutes after he's off shift. I have her car keys, and I'm parked close by, waiting.

The entire interior of the car is covered in plastic sheeting. I know his license plate number, and I'm right next to his old van. I don't get out of the car until I see him coming, and like I figured he might, he doesn't even pay me any attention.

My heart's thumping right up against my eyes. Now that I'm here, I'm numb. I thought I'd be scared, thought I'd want to back out; I figured no one really wants to kill, deep down in their soul. People who murder somebody, they do it in the moment, or because they've got no other choice. Me, I'm doing this because I want to, and I'm not even thinking about turning back.

I know that I could, but I know that I won't.

“ Hey, mister.” I turn and wave an arm in his face as he comes up towards the driver's seat of his van. He barely looks my way.

The coast is clear. No one's out on a Tuesday night at a quarter to twelve. I leap up on his back, and it's quick.

It's so quick.

He does fight me. I wrestle my hand, slippery with the soaked cloth, and manage to get it over his mouth and nose. I don't accomplish it before he manages to throw himself back and slam me against Mama's car, and I have a distant – stupid – thought, that she'll be pissed if the door is dented. Every second passes with a thousand heartbeats, his and mine, freaking out in equal measure but I'm still so mild. I don't feel a thing.

He slumps, hits the asphalt and takes me with him. I taste gravel and my chin bounces off the ground. My lungs feel like they're being ripped to pieces from the inside out, just in time for me to realize I was breathing so hard that I just can't anymore.

So I hold my breath. I open the back door of Mama's car, throw the rag inside. Then I bend at the knees and hook my arms under his.

Hauling him in is easier than I think it should be. It's the adrenaline. I shove him around real carelessly, because he's never going to wake up to feel the bruises. It takes hard work, but I pack him into the backseat, then pluck my knife out from inside my boot.

Mama showed me just where to puncture. My hands are shaking so bad, but if I look closely, I imagine I can see his pulse bulging out against his wrinkled throat. I dig the point of the knife right in.

It's shallow. Blood beads at the point of the knife, but doesn't spill or gush like it does in movies. It's nothing like a movie at all.

I stop holding my breath, and I shove the hilt with one thrust of my palm.

Everything becomes blurry. I see Mama coming up to the car, but I don't know how much time passes. I know that one moment, he had just a nick in his neck, and the next... The blood's created a sea along the bottom of the backseat. My hands are drenched, chest is drenched, and my clothes aren't gonna be salvageable. I think manic, stupid thoughts while I pile into the passenger seat and start mopping myself off.

Mama packs some things into the trunk. She's got a lot of shopping bags from my favourite clothing store. She brings in a couple of things, and I change right there. Normally I'd be embarrassed 'cause I don't like undressing in front of people, even Mama, but I don't care right now. When I get out of the car, my soaked boots remain behind, and I step into new ones that she left right outside on the ground for me.

I'm still tying the laces when the car pulls away and drives into the night.

There's a bit of my blood on the ground. I know it's mine, it's from my split lip – I bit it when I fell, wasn't thinking, but I don't have anything to clean it up. So I just follow through with the plan.

I go inside the station, catch the last train, and ride it all the way to the end.

There's a coffee place that's open twenty-four hours a day, and I find it. I sit there, drinking hot chocolate like a little kid, stare at the table with no thoughts at all. I sit there for hours and hours. I want to get something with caffeine to keep me from feeling sleepy, but I don't need it.

Mama picks me up when it's practically dawn, and I don't sleep all day.

Neither does Mama.

  
  


I never ask what she did with the body. I keep my promise.

I never become a serial killer, either. The thought of my blood, easy to trace back to me if the police knew where to look, haunts me.

And I never doubt that my Mama loves me again.


End file.
